"After more than 1 million measurement cycles, the internal
worst-case latency was only 47 us, reports Emde. This was despite
the fact that the test ran the X Window systen on a
hardware-accelerated graphics board, "with heavy use of the entire
system including video and audio playback during more than a day,"
he adds. Additionally, the system enduring ping floods and other
network harassment during the trial.
"Emde also reports on a second test running on an Intel Core 2
at 2.4GHz with a 64-bit kernel, which resulted in an internal
worst-case latency of 39 us. This is still not in the single-digit
latency neighborhood of true hardened real-time operating systems
(RTOSes), but it is certainly an impressive showing for a
multimedia-enabled Linux environment."